Chapter 3.
...TIME & TIDE…
In this chapter we describe the methods used to prove that the body of the Somerton Man was placed on the beach AFTER the high tide that morning. He didn't get there by himself the question is who put him there?
It was a Spring Tide at 4.34 am the morning of December 1st, 1948, the highest tide of the year with Glenelg, just a kilometer North of Somerton, recording a tide height of 9 feet. It was the day on which the body of the SOMERTON MAN was found.
He was found with his head propped up against the low sea wall that was also known as the ‘high tide’ mark, the evidence in this chapter shows that the incoming tide would reach that wall especially if it was the highest tide of the year.
And yet, nowhere in the official Police documents or even those of the inquest, was a mention made of the tide on that day. Would it have reached the wall that morning and what if it did?
The only thing we can do is to first look at the evidence and what it tells us. Our evidence includes documents and images.
We know what time the tide was it its highest, 4.34 am. We know when the man was found, 6.20 am approximately and when Constable Moss examined the scene at approximately 7 am.
Here are some quotes from the witnesses and from the inquest document:
1. 'The body was cold and damp when found', PC Moss
2. 'The body had not been in the water', Cleland
3. 'The sand around the body had not been disturbed', Coroner Cleland
The question raised is this, wouldn't the high tide of 9 feet, have reached the high watermark where the body was found against the low sea wall? But how will that be verified? Where would we start?
THE EXERCISE...
Here’s what we did:
The vertical height between the road surface and the sand at the foot of the low sea wall in December 1948 had to be ascertained. The photograph of the beach at the time was invaluable:
As you can see there are numerous steps leading down to the sand in fact, in this image, we can make out 16 steps in the upper flight and 5 in the lower flight, 21 steps in total with 7.0 inches being the approximate height of each plus allow a further 4 inches for the slight slope between the end of the first flight of steps to the beginning of the second flight which equates to 151 inches or 3.8 meters distance/height from the beach floor at the foot of the low sea wall to the road surface. ( In fact, there were two standard step heights in Australia at the time I understand, one being an adopted from the US which sets the step height at 7.5 inches and the other being the Australian standard of 7 inches. For our purposes, we have used the Australian standard of 7 inches step height.)
In our calculations, we were cognisant of the April 1948 Storm at Glenelg that resulted in the shifting of vast amounts of sand across the coastline. In essence, though, we are only concerned with the relative measurements of steps and road to beach floor measurement on December 1st, 1948.
Google Earth Imagery, 2021
This image shows a Google Earth view of the junction of The Esplanade and Bickford Terrace at Somerton which joins from the right. You should be able to make out the red line that indicates the distance between the edge of the pathway alongside the road and the beach floor. The body was found near this location.
You will note that the pathways and road combined appear to be considerably wider than the 1948 images would suggest. The council has built out the edge of the existing roadway to include a beachside path. Interestingly in so doing, they added an estimated 150 mm to the vertical height between the high watermark and the edge of the brick paving alongside the road surface. This extra height was by virtue of the new brick paving that was laid adjacent to the roadway. By subtracting that 150 mm from the Google Earth height dimension we would have a height very similar to the height of the road in 1948.
As you can see the rock beach wall is quite steep as a result of the road/footpath extension which in turn most likely lead to the installation of the diagonal pathway that you can see in the next image:
The marked image above shows the location of the diagonal pathway as highlighted in black. It also shows how debris has been washed up to the high-water line.
The dimensions show us that the pathway edge is at 7.75 meters elevation ( adjusted for the height of the brick paving) and the beach floor at that point is 3.65 meters. That means that the distance from the edge of the pathway to the beach floor
= 4.1 metres.
This measurement of 4.1 meters from the road to the high water mark compares to the 1948 low sea wall at 3.8 meters. This has a significant impact on the question of just when the body of the Somerton Man was placed on the beach.
(There was another witness that could have some bearing on this matter, in a newspaper article from August 2021, an 11-year-old boy was taking a very early morning walk along Somerton Beach with his dog. It was before sunrise which puts it at sometime around 5.30am to 6 am. His name was Rodger Todd. In the newspaper report though, Rodger thought that the time was 7 am. which was incorrect but given the 70 years or so in between that morning walk and the report, August 2021, it's no surprise. What was interesting was that according to Rodger, after he had run home to tell his mother that he had seen a man lying on the beach and he thought he was dead, he was looking out of the window and saw two ambulances and two police cars at the scene..
No mention of these 4 vehicles, by default we know that Constable Moss arrived in a car and that he called the Police ambulance (A euphemism for the section body van). But when you think it through, we don't know which Police station Rodger's Mother had called, I suspect that she may have called either Glenelg or HQ in Adelaide. That would mean that both Brighton and the station she called would have been involved and dispatched the vehicles.. To make sure that this is correct, we would need to get an understanding of where the Police ambulances were stationed. READ MORE HERE)
That’s still straightforward enough but there is something not quite right about the witness and Coroners court statements. Given that the high tide was 9 feet and the time that occurred was 4.34 am then surely the comments made by Constable Moss, the Pathologist, and the Coroner had to be incorrect?
With those timings and findings:
• Wouldn’t the man’s body have been soaked by the incoming tide?
• How could the man’s body not have been in the water with the tide so high?
• How does the ‘Sand around the body’ get to be 'undisturbed'?
• What about the lack of cigarette butts and spent matches? The man was a heavy smoker and all he had was one, part smoked, cigarette on his coat lapel when found that morning.
As a consequence of this line of thought, and knowing that making a claim is one thing but providing substantiation is quite another, I looked further into the issue of the tides and whether or not it could be proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the tide that morning did indeed reach that low sea wall. Because if it did, then his body would have been soaked, it wasn't. That leaves only one conclusion, he must have been put there AFTER the high tide.
But where to start?
Let me explain, according to the examining Doctor at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Dr. Bennett, the time of death for the man was 2 am, later, in another chapter that deals with the autopsy and the inquest, you will read that it could have been some hours earlier. The expert witness, Professor Stanford Hicks, agreed with Dr. Bennett that the time of death was around 2 am.
We have seen the evidence and findings from the inquest which shows that the sand around the body was undisturbed at 7 am, we know that Professor Cleland's evidence states that the body of the man had not been in the water. And yet we have shown that the tide had reached the wall which meant that his body should have been soaked. It wasn’t.
The Google Earth image above shows a recent view of the exact place where the body of the Somerton Man was found on December 1st, 1948, this image is dated December 15th, 2020, the Spring Tide had occurred in early December, just as it did in December 1st, 1948.
You can see the measurements marked on the image and you can quickly calculate that the height of the rock wall from the Pathway edge to the beach floor is just around 15.6 feet. In fact, when Dr. John Luick and I compared the notes, the vertical height of 14.3 feet in 1948, a difference of 1.3 feet perhaps the result of the regularly shifting sands over the years.
The question that we need to answer now is this. In the images slightly down the page from here, you will see that the water has risen to cover all of the sand to the base of the sea wall but what was the height of the tide on the day the image was taken? Read on
(It transpires the Department of the Environment has had responsibility over the years for maintaining sand levels. In the early days that was done by physically trucking loads of beach sand from one beach to another. In recent years that system was upgraded when they added a pipeline from Glenelg to Kingston beach, the pipe itself was concealed beneath the rock wall that you can see in the image.)
2. THE FIRST CLUE
That 14.3-foot measurement was one of the first clues, Dr. Luick used that in his first assessment of just how far up the beach the high tide had traveled. If you look closely at the image at the top of this post, you will see that there is debris, more than likely seaweed, scattered along the beach close to the base of the rock sea wall. What if that tide in 1948 did the same thing, what if it too brought with it a payload of seaweed and other debris?
THE CALCULATIONS
As you have read in earlier posts on this subject, the calculations that were derived from the number and estimated height of the steps leading down to the sand gave us the vertical height between the edge of the road to the beach floor in 1948. Surprisingly, the vertical measurements were remarkably similar to those we discovered in the Google Earth Satellite image shown above. This despite a fair amount of work that has taken place in the intervening years; the whole embankment and its low sea wall, as was in 1948, was reworked on at least two occasions in that time. The most recent works that we see evidenced in the top image, added a fairly wide footpath to the beachside of the Esplanade leading to the steepening of the angle of the rock-covered sea wall. But, the vertical height from the edge of the pathway to the beach floor, faithfully recorded by Google Earth, remains almost the same as it was in December 1948.
Dr Luick and I have exchanged numerous emails over the course of the last months discussing the various measurements and came to the conclusion that having similar measurements was all well and good but what we really needed was a photograph taken at or near the time, December 1st 1948, that would prove the tide reached up to the low sea wall. We needed an image that showed debris washed up by the sea and against that low wall as the tide rolled in. A big ask.
4. THE BREAKTHROUGH EVIDENCE
As you have probably surmised, we found a photograph that did just that. Better still, this was a Police photograph, here it is:
It was the original image that shows the location where the body was found on the beach and the Crippled Children's Home. We believe that the image was taken within 7 days or so of the finding of the body. Researching Wiki, we found that the image was marked as having Crown copyright and that it was named as a Police photograph taken in 1948.
The marked area to the right of the steps shows a quantity of debris, quite probably seaweed, right against the low sea wall. How did it get there? One way was by the action of the high tide. Here's a larger, unmarked image showing the same debris:
'I cannot say whether or not that is debris left at high tide. I would agree that if the seaweed/debris was left at a high tide, then the tide would have reached the body that night because the tides were at the “springs” portion of the spring/neap cycle at the time.' Dr. john Luick
This result is as close to a solid confirmation as we can hope to get. As John points out, there is no way we could say the tide definitely carried the debris to the wall; apart from having a film of the tide moving in on that day which we do not have. However, what we have is close as anyone could expect to get to it, we can say that, on the balance of probabilities, then it would be the tide that washed the debris in. To underline that, the Google Earth image was taken of the same location in December 2020, with extraordinarily similar measurements, also shows debris along that same stretch of sand and very close to the wall. Further evidence was provided by Constable Moss at the 1949 Inquest, in his words, 'The sand around the body was undisturbed..' How does sand get to be undisturbed? One certain way is when the sand gets washed over by the tide.
And then came the following images:
THE FINAL PROOF
This evidence was found in January 2022, it shows two critically important images of the location as of April 2nd. 2014:
The view in the above image as marked is the approximate location where the body was found.
As you can see the sand is well covered by the incoming tide and this was some 20 minutes prior to the tide reaching its peak of 7 feet 9 inches on the date the image was taken, 2nd April 2014.
Bear in mind that the calculated distance from the top of the wall, adjusted for the additional height of the brick paving, was 4.1 meters. Thus the sand was covered by the 7 feet 9-inch tide in the same location where the body of the Somerton Man was found.
The high tide on 1st December 1948 was forecast to be 9 feet, adding 1ft 3-inch to the tide experienced in the same location on April 2nd, 2014.
Had the tide on the 2nd of April 2014 been at 9 feet, the water over the sand would have been that much higher.
It had been a warm night and the average daytime temperature on December 1st, 1948 was 31 C with a high of 41 C. Records show that the temperature at 8 am that day was 30 C. Wind speed was an average of 18 klm per hour.
Weather information for Decmber 1st 1948 from Wolfram Alpha (Link)
TIDE LEVEL 10 MINUTES AFTER HIGH TIDE:
HOW FAST THE TIDE TURNS...
This image was taken looking north, and you can see how the tide has receded leaving smooth undisturbed sand in its wake. On Dember 1st 1948, Constable Moss stated that it was a hot day, heading for the upper 70s. The sand would have dried out quite quickly once the sun got to it.
THE IMPLICATIONS
One of the first reports in the press clearly states that ' The body had not been in the water', similar words to those uttered in evidence at the inquest. The body had not been in the water, Moss described the man's condition being 'Cold and damp', not soaked or wet, the term used was damp. How could that be if as this newly uncovered evidence states, the tide had reached the wall?
If the tide reached the wall and the man had been there then there is no doubt whatsoever that he would have been soaked and not just damp... It looks more and more like he wasn't soaked because he wasn't there.
In this scenario, there is only one answer, the man was placed against the wall after the high tide had receded enough to allow others to undertake that task. I suggest that it would have taken at least two people to move the man given his height and build.
It would also mean that the man seen the previous evening in a similar location may not have been the Somerton Man. Coroner Cleland would have the answer to his question, all the problems go away if this were a different man.
I would go a step further, the problems go away when you learn that the body must have been put there after 4.34 am that morning.
From the Police investigation perspective, the case now becomes a suspected murder, there is enough evidence here to justify that.
For consideration, when you examine all of the documentation, including those of the inquest and its witness statements, there is no mention at all amongst them of the tide and yet it was amongst the highest tides of the year, the Spring/ Neap tide. Why would that be?
THE SIGNIFICANCE
This is a real and significant breakthrough of a huge and far-reaching impact. Not that long ago we had nothing to suggest that the tide would have played a part, and today, we are in a position that strongly suggests that the newly discovered evidence will add extra impetus to the Police case and cause them to rethink what really happened on that night of November 30th/ December 1st, 1948.
In my view, when you add this information to earlier breakthrough information including the Microcode on the code page, the Boxall Rubaiyat code and the Danetta code found in Tibor Kaldor's last letter, and even more recently in the copy of the Rubaiyat found with the body of George Marshall as you will read in a later chapter. it is difficult to deny that this is anything other than an espionage case.
Dr. John Luick
I once again extend my sincere thanks and gratitude to our expert witness, Dr. John Luick, his advice, guidance and professionalism have helped this case enormously. We would have been lost without it.